The goal of the aliens among us is not the study of Earth for purely academic purposes. It is something more vital to the aliens and more portentous for us. The picture that emerges from much research makes sense of several aspects of the alien presence, previously quite puzzling. They apparently are a dying race inhabiting a dying planet. They have undoubtedly mastered physical forces and phenomena of which we have not even dreamed. But it has come at a terrible cost. Their emotional life has been all but lost, existing only as a faint remnant from a long distant past. They may pity our hopelessly primitive technology, but they envy us our robust emotional life. Like all living things everywhere they live for the perpetuation of their genes. They do not hate us, nor do they seek our destruction. They seek to create a race of hybrids, combining their scientifically superior minds with our rich emotional makeup. The ridicule of the entire subject by the government and other forces, fearful of upheaval in our society, has aggravated the suffering of those chosen and victimized by the aliens, who apparently seek, ineptly sometimes, to minimize it.